I Can See Your Villain

I thought of this while reviewing the section of the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide related to villainous plots. It’s great to have a villain in your campaign.

If the players know they’re up to something.

I’ve run into this problem a lot in my campaigns, to the point where I think I’ve only really had maybe one successful villain. I technically had one in my very first campaign but he was more a looming shadow than a lingering threat.

There was that one time he almost wiped the party. But that was kind of an accident. They didn’t much care about him apart from that one time.

No, but really.

If your players can’t see what your villain is doing, then there’s hardly a point for it. There’s a caveat to this — if the players think they know what the villain is up to, you’re good. And you technically don’t have to do anything.

I’ll describe the difference.

Okay, so the last thing you want to do is just straight-up tell the players what your villain is up to, like a cutaway scene or something. I mean, what are the players even supposed to do with that knowledge?

But to be relevant, I mean for your players to care about a villain, they have to actually be doing something. None of this “Orcus on his throne” nonsense.

Some puppies need to be kicked. Some villages need to be burned.

I mean, you can have a series of seemingly unrelated events connected by the villain who was orchestrating them all along. I think this is the justification for having a “Big Bad” as a villain. They were always technically involved.

Which means “Orcus on his throne” is justifiable.

But it isn’t quite the same. No, because you need to have Orcus’s minions out doing stuff for it to count as Orcus’s involvement, right? It has to come back to Orcus in the end.

Which means the story has to ultimately lead back to Orcus. I think this example has officially usurped my blog post. See what I did there?

Was this post always about Orcus? Considering how much time I spent talking about him, you might think so — and a good GM would probably encourage that.

So, you know.

Show your players what your villain is doing. They don’t have to show up and take credit for things all the time. But it can be super-blatant with your d12 rumors or whatever. “Evil Lord So-and-So is at it again!”

Like this:

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Discussion (10) ¬

This kind of reminds me of that one page dungeon “The Wizard in the Woods is Up To Something (Maybe)” that kind of lampshades this.

I think a good way to avoid “Orcus on his Throne” is to do the whole “Saruman Scopes Out the Shire” thing. I honestly can’t remember if it was canonically in LotR since it’s been over a decade since I read them, but in the old War in Middle Earth RTS, right as Frodo leaves Hobbiton, you would ALWAYS get the “Frodo passes an Old Man” encounter, with heavy implications that Saruman is there looking for the Ring.

I’m sad that I’ll never know how effective Richmond/Caelden was in this regard. By the time the Alfheim game fell apart, players were suspicious enough to not just hand elf trinkets over to him anymore, but they hadn’t quite made all of the connections, such as the cultist dying in jail because of his agents and malaise that had set over the city because vampirism…

I have to give one of my players credit for establishing the villain of my campaign. There was this dracolich, you see. When the player ran a one-shot for the group, the party failed to stop the dracolich’s resurrection. There was a whole ritual.

Anyway, fast-forward a couple of in-game months, and the players are feeling “kind of bad” for having let the dracolich decimate that one city’s population, when they hear news that he’s consolidated his power and is marching on one PC’s home town.

Now, the PC was mostly interested in his claim to the throne of that town — he couldn’t rule it if it was destroyed by an army of the undead. And because this group was (at the time) terrible at forward-thinking, I started participating in their planning sessions.

Stuff like, “your enemy is a centuries-old mastermind. He would have thought of that.” Vetoing ideas not as a GM, but as a “fellow player.” I had a policy that “anything the PCs can do, the NPCs can do,” and when used long-range teleportation . . . I gave them a Doomsday clock.

Yeah, the villain got a lot of credit for stuff they never actually saw, but it worked because they THOUGHT he was up to stuff. And we still talk about the climactic “battle,” and the repercussions of that campaign. It doesn’t help that I’m a smug jerk, too.

Heh. In our AD&D game, we’ve accidentally made someone who should’ve been a push-over a major player in the dungeon. We decided it would be easier to help out Gaxxis(sp?), the goblin king of the kobolds in the megadungeon and use his village as a base (it had part of a magic key to level 2 that would’ve otherwise required a kobold genocide to get at) to attack the orc followers of a young black dragon. Of course now with the dungeon level cleared out and Gaxis left at the top of the level 1 heap, goblin and kobold raiders have been far more active on the island and no one in the city knows why but us. We’re almost to the point where we’re going to have to put our foot down.

Heh, that’s “dungeon as a base of operation” in motion. Our 5e dungeon hasn’t been super-dynamic thus far, but we also haven’t encountered anything that we weren’t able to steamroll in combat.

I’ve started asking our GM about “wandering monsters” as we come and go from the dungeon, in order to get the other players thinking about it. We have this weird culture of silence at the table. . .

Nobody reminds the GM of things that should be challenging us, and so the GM has to come up with every threat. If I can raise awareness of stuff like this, “pay it forward,” if you will. . . the next game I run will be easier.

Heh… I don’t know if you read my last post about the Stone Golem, but I mentioned to our DM how impressed/stumped we were by it. He himself was kind of shocked that we had approached it as a puzzle; it had really just be a crazy thing that was supposed to murder us that turned into an ascendant riddle.

He’s considering throwing up invisible walls in his pre-generated city (I’m not sure how it’s generated, but I gather that he pre-gens random rooms and sticks them in buildings as we explore them/as they fit in the map, but I couldn’t say for sure), partly because we have a bad habit of screwing around when we know we should be somewhere else, but I think I may have talked him out of it. So far, everything has been procedurally generated and therefore all of the puzzles have come up as part of emergent gameplay. It’s been a really different experience, but I’ve been really enjoying it. And we’ve all learned to fear and respect the buzzing of giant wasps…

Over the weekend, I purchased PDFs of A Red and Pleasant Land, Yoon Suin, and Vornheim, because I’ve been meaning to for basically forever. Cookiemonger has already vowed to get me a hard copy of AR&PL for Christmas. We’ve been talking about bringing up LotFP for our next campaign, specifically to play “Alice in Wonderland with Vampires.”

All of that stuff has been an influence on my DM to some degree. Even though he’s fairly new to DMing, he collects and owns a lot of the really weird stuff to come out of the OSR (he actually USES Fire on the Velvet Horizon). I’ve thumbed through Red and Pleasant Land, and seeing so much stuff about it lately, I feel like I should do the same with his copy of Yoon Suin.